REVIEW OF BOOK: BLACK INK: LITERARY LEGENDS ON THE PERIL, POWER, AND PLEASURE OF READING AND WRITING, EDITED BY STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER

**Review of Book: BLACK INK: LITERARY LEGENDS on the PERIL, POWER, and PLEASURE of READING and WRITING. Foreword by Nikki Giovanni. Edited by Stephanie Stokes Oliver**

Subject: The History of the Struggle and Achievement of Literacy and Education for African Americans

Background: Stephanie Strokes Oliver is an author and an editor. She was the editor of Essence magazine and founding editor in chief of Heart & Soul.

BLACK INK is an anthology containing the writings of 25 notable African American authors that are historically arranged. As the editor of BLACK INK, and in her introduction to BLACK INK, Oliver states: “The story of the struggle for full literacy among African Americans has yet to be documented … thoroughly. The purpose of BLACK INK: LITERARY LEGENDS on the PERIL, POWER, and PLEASURE of READING and WRITING is to help fill that void.”[i]

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Through twenty-five well chosen, powerful, and direct first-person narratives by recognized authors, BLACK INK tells of the quest for literacy to achieve new vistas of intellectual and social accomplishments for African Americans.

BLACK INK is divided into three sections:

The PERIL, 1800-1900, “…when it was illegal for enslaved people to learn to read and write, yet the power of human spirit prevailed.”[ii]
The POWER, 1900-1968, “In this era, from the post-Emancipation period through Civil Rights / Black Power era, writers as diverse as Zora Neale Hurston and Stokley Carmichael had something in common-the relentless pursuit of equality and freedom for all.”[iii]
The PLEASURE, 1968-2017, “Authors born in the post-Baby Boom years share the current challenges and joys of self-expression and literary diversity.”[iv]

To give a sense of the BLACK INK, I will highlight an author, or authors, in each section.

The PERIL Section: Excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (published 1845)

As a youth Douglass fought against extreme odds to learn to read and write. At the age of twelve as a slave he was taught the alphabet by the wife of his slave master, but at the insistence of her husband, she stopped any further teaching:

“Mr. Auld [slave master] found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld [slave master’s wife] to instruct me further, telling her among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master-to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself [Douglass]) how to read there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit he to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.’”[v]

What the slave master said struck to the core of Douglass’ being and gave him insight into the power of slavery to deprive him of his own humanity and freedom. This gave him the personal resolve to pursue his own learning. Douglass states:

“From that moment on, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which by the merest of accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.”[vi]

Douglass used a barter system to learn to read from white children who were able to attend school. He bartered bread, which was provided readily in his household, to the white children, who were not that well off and who did not readily have bread for food, for instruction in reading. To learn to write he visited a shipyard where boats were built and learned from the labeling of the ship parts how to write letters. He used this knowledge to challenge other white children that he could write as well as they could by writing the letters he had learned in the shipyard: “In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I could not have gotten in any other way. During this time, my copy-book was the board fence, a brick wall, and pavement; my pen and ink was a lump a chalk.”[vii] Further, he managed to gain access to the master’s son’s discarded spelling books and secretly copied over the son’s handwriting and “…after a long tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.”[viii]

Other authors’ writings in the PERIL section are from Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup, Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington, and W.E. Du Bois: Writings, Edited by Nathan Huggins.

The POWER Section: Excerpt from What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008), by Toni Morrison, and an Excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), by Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

The POWER section contains the most selections of authors’ writings and the selections of writings build upon the trailblazing work of the authors of slave narratives to forge new gains in literacy and in racial and social identity.

Toni Morrison describes the slave narratives of the PERIL period as follows:

“In addition to using their own lives to expose the horrors of slavery, they had a companion motive for their efforts. The prohibition against teaching a slave to read and write (which in many Southern states carried severe punishment) and against a slave’s learning to read and write had to be scuttled at all costs. These writers knew that literacy was power. Voting, after all, was inextricably connected to the ability to read; literacy was a way of assuming and proving the ‘humanity’ that the Constitution denied them.” [ix]

Morrison finds the slave narratives reticent in going too deeply into the horrors of slavery. With the expectation that remaining as objective as possible by not delving too much into the horrors of slavery, the authors of the slave narratives sought to gain a wider audience, the audience for example of whites, who could help end slavery. Morrison feels it is her job as a writer of fiction to show the interior thoughts and feelings of people as slaves that the slave narratives shied away from. To quote Morrison:

Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over the proceeding to terrible to relate.’ In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things. There was a careful selection of the instances that they would record and a careful rendering of those that they chose to describe.

But most importantly-at least for me-there was not mention of their interior life.

For me-a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman-the exercise is different. My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceeding to terrible to relate.’ The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.”[x]

For Morrison as a writer of fiction it is the use of her imagination of the historical people and times to invoke the truth:

Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of imagination-invention-and claims the freedom to dispense with ‘what really happened,’ or where it really happened, or when it really happened, and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much it it can be verified. By contrast, the scholarship of the biographer and the literary critic seems to us only trustworthy when the events of fiction can be traced to some publicly verifiable fact. It’s the research of the ‘Oh, yes this is where he or she got if from’ school, which gets its own credibility from excavating the credibility of the sources of imagination, not the nature of imagination…”

“…the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. So, I am looking to find and expose the truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it); if I am trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left-to part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to implement the stories that I heard-then the approach that’s most productive to me is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the image.”[xi]

Morrison gives her method of seeking truth in working from evidence of evoking images first and then text second to form her characters and events. In this, she is scrupulous to the inner life of her characters; she takes it that as a writer she is not to lie- that fidelity to the truth and how she reaches the truth is her gravest responsibility as a writer.[xii]

Malcolm X from an excerpt drawn from his The Autobiography of Malcolm X is revolted by a situation that changes the course of his life. He was in eighth grade in the Lansing Michigan area and at the top of his class academically. A teacher, Mr. Ostrowki, asked Malcolm X what career he would like to pursue. Malcolm X had not given this much prior thought, but seeing no black professionals in the area that were doctors or lawyers, answered he would like to be a lawyer. Mr. Ostrowski was surprised by his answer and replied:

“Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you have to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer-that’s not realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. Your good with your hands-making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person-you’d get all kinds of work.”[xiii]

Malcolm X is offended by the low social expectations placed upon him and he would not settle for this: his destiny was not to live in the derogatory world whites had for blacks. Soon after this incident, he asks his half-sister in Boston whether he can live with her in and she complies bringing him to Boston, into a vibrant black community.

Other authors and works in the POWER section are Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), by Zora Neale Hurston; The Big Sea (1940), by Langston Hughes; Notes of a Native Son (1955), by James Baldwin;; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), by Maya Angelou; The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (edited by Claybourne Carson, 1998); “Where are People of Color in Children’s Books” (New York Times, March 16, 2014, page SR1), by Walter J Meyers; Read for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame True)(2003), by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture); In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1973), by Alice Walker; A Small Place (1988), by Jamacia Kincaid; “What is an African American Classic?” By Henry Louis Gates as the General Introduction to Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup (Penguin Books, 2008); Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (1990), Edited by Terry McMillan, from her Introduction, “New Black Scribe.”

The PLEASURE Section: Excerpt from Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay and “The Danger of the Single Story,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [the text of her 2009 TED presentation]

The influence of stories in general upon people’s lives, and the complexity and diversity of black literature of and black history are prominent in the PLEASURE section.

Roxane Gay writes that “Books are often far more than just books.”[xiv] For her as a preteen, teen, and adult the Sweet Valley High series, including the sequel Sweet Valley Confidential, contains memories of her as unpopular, awkward black student wanting to fit in at a white suburban school system like the characters did in the pristine and perfect world of Sweet Valley High. As an adult she states:

“I am nearly forty, but my love of Sweet Valley remains strong and immediate. When I read the books now, I know I am reading garbage, but I remember what it was like spending my afternoons in Sweet Valley hanging out with the Wakefield twins and Enid Rollins and Lila Fowler and Bruce Patman and Todd Wilkins and Winston Egbert. The nostalgia I feel for those books and these people makes my chest ache.

…Like I said, nostalgia is powerful and the power builds over time; it often reshapes our memories. It is not that the original Sweet Valley High books were the mark of great literature, but that to some preteen and teenage girls, the books were the most familiar and resonant expressions of our angst and fondest wishes for ourselves, the girls we wanted to become. There is still a young girl-heart throbbing in many of us. Those of us who read Sweet Valley Confidential were looking to recapture some of the Sweet Valley magic from our youth.”[xv]

The derogatory story Malcolm X encountered with his teacher about blacks knowing their place in society would be termed a single story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that contracts us-make us more negative- with only one view on matters. Whereas stories about a matter expand us to see the positivity and the multiplicity in a matter. She notes that “It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power…Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”[xvi]

Further, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story… The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather then how we are similar.”[xvii]

Importantly, Adichie lives by her words and has set up a nonprofit in her home country of Nigeria to bring benefits of stories and literacy to others:

“My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a nonprofit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don’t have anything in their libraries, and also organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and in writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair the broken dignity.”[xviii]

Other writers in the PLEASURE section are “MFA vs. POC”, by Junot Diaz published in Dismantle: An Anthology of Writing from the VONA / Voices Writing Workshop (2014); Create Dangerously, by Edwidge Danticat; “How to Write,” by Colon Whitehead, New York Times, July 29, 2012, page BR8; “From Jamaicia to Minnesota to Myself,” by Marlon James, New York Times, March 15, 2015, page MM60;; Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates; “Obama on Books that Guided Him, Interview by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, January 16, 2017, page A15.

BLACK INK has well-chosen writings and attains its objective of chronicling the history of literacy, education, self-expression, and racial identity for African-Americas.

FOOTNOTES

[ii] Ibid, p 1

[iii] Ibid, p 47

[iv] Ibid, p 160

[v] Ibid, p 4

[vi] Ibid, pp 4-5

[vii] Ibid, p 12

[viii] Ibid, p 12

[ix] Ibid, p 102

[x] Ibid, pp 103-104

[xi] Ibid, pp 105-106

[xii] Ibid p 105

[xiii] Ibid, p 77

[xiv] Ibid, p 206

[xv] Ibid, pp 203-204

[xvi]Ibid, p 219

[xvii] Ibid, p 221

[xviii] Ibid, p 222